1. Field of the Invention
This description generally relates to securing magnets within or to plastic parts, and more particularly to one or more methods, devices, and/or systems for attaching a magnet or other non-plastic part to a plastic part in a variety of manufacturing applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
The staking of plastic materials is one technique for joining materials, such as thermoplastic materials. There are four common methods of staking, including cold staking, heat staking, thermo staking, and ultrasonic staking or welding. The choice of the joining process is often dependent upon the materials to be joined, the loads to which the assembly will be subjected and/or the required cosmetic appearance.
In each case, accurate alignment of the components is important to the quality of the joint. The common design parameters may include stud diameter, stud height and stud geometry. Due to the deformation of previously formed parts, effective staking is often restricted to thermoplastic materials. For example, in heat staking, a probe is heated so that less pressure is required to form a head on a stud. This widens the application of staking to a broader spectrum of thermoplastic materials than is possible with cold staking, including glass-filled materials. The quality of the joint is dependent on control of the processing parameters: temperature, pressure and time—a typical cycle time might be between 1 to 5 seconds.
Heat staking has the advantage that parts can be disassembled. It also has the flexibility to allow the simultaneous formation of a large number of studs and to accommodate a variety of stud head designs.